- Turkey: Regime uses NATO summit as excuse for mass abduction operation
Source: US News & World Report
“Turkish authorities detained 209 people in anti-terrorism operations on Tuesday, prosecutors said, a day after Ankara imposed restrictions on public gatherings ahead of next month’s NATO summit. Opposition groups said the raids were part of what they called a broader crackdown on democracy and civic freedoms in Turkey. The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office said arrest warrants had been issued for 241 suspects under investigations into several militant organisations, including Islamic State and the far-left DHKP-C, MLKP and TKP/ML groups. It said 209 suspects had been detained and efforts to locate the remaining suspects were underway. … The operations came a day after the Ankara Governor’s Office announced a 13-day ban on demonstrations, press conferences, and other public gatherings from June 28 to July 10, citing security concerns related to the July 7-8 NATO summit.” (06/23/26)
- CA: Law that forbids forced outing of trans students blocked by 9th Circuit
Source: Seattle Times
“California’s effort to shield the decisions of transgender students in public schools from the eyes of prying parents remains on hold this week after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found a state law designed to protect them was likely unconstitutional. … Passed in 2024, the California law known as Assembly Bill 1955 was intended to prevent school employees from notifying parents about a student’s gender expression without their consent. Boosters of the law [note that] it protects vulnerable students from ‘forced outing’ to families who may be hostile to their trans and nonbinary children. Opponents [pretend] it compels schools to ‘mislead’ parents about their children and leaves them ‘shut out’ of critical decisions.” (06/23/26)
- Lithuania: Regime steps down after coalition reshuffle
Source: ABC News
“Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė and her cabinet stepped down Tuesday after changes to the ruling coalition, setting the stage for the Baltic country’s third prime minister in two years and an incoming government that has pledged to pursue a more pragmatic relationship with China after years of strained ties. Ruginienė’s government collapsed after the center-left Social Democrats ended their coalition agreement earlier this month with the scandal-ridden populist Nemuno Aušra party as one of its former leaders faces allegations of antisemitic rhetoric.” (06/23/26)
- Kelo’s Legacy: 21 Years of Economic Development Failures
Source: Independent Institute
by Edward J López“This week marks the 21st anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. City of New London. This landmark case allows local governments to take private properties by eminent domain, then transfer those properties to developers to promote economic development. Urban planners describe eminent domain, if used correctly, as a tool that can promote blight abatement, job creation, and tax base expansion. The Court did not express agreement with this in its ruling, but it said that as long as a local government’s plan for economic development was crafted through an open democratic process, then using eminent domain for economic development serves the public and is therefore legal. Taking homes and businesses by majority vote. If this strikes you as an idea ripe for unintended consequences, that’s because it is. Since Kelo, local governments across the country have advanced creative notions of public purpose.” (06/23/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/06/23/legacy-kelo-years-economic-failures/
- War Isn’t Won on “Points”
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison“Matt Kroenig has wanted the U.S. to attack Iran for more than a decade. Now that he got the war he wanted and it failed, he is reduced to arguing this: ‘To be sure, the United States did not register a knockout punch against the Islamic Republic, but to continue the boxing metaphor, it did win on points.’ War isn’t a sport, and there is no winning on ‘points.’ The ghouls that cheered this war on treat war as if it were a video game where you get more ‘points’ with every person you kill or maim. How many ‘points’ did the U.S. get from massacring the innocent schoolgirls in Minab with missiles? If the U.S. won, as Kroenig insists, what did we win? What does the U.S. have now that it didn’t have before?” (06/23/26)
- Trump’s second term is a murky, embarrassing and costly spectacle
Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jonah Goldberg“Every time I get asked by a TV anchor what I think about the drama of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, my favorite ‘historical’ headline from the Onion comes to mind: ‘World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg’ And every time I do, I hear from defenders of the Trump administration complaining about the disproportionate media coverage of what should be a very minor story in the grand sweep of things. They have a point. … I can think of scores of stories that deserve more attention on the merits. But there are two problems with this complaint. First, it was Trump who invited extensive scrutiny of the effort. … Second, there’s the metaphor-on-the-Mall problem. The Reflecting Pool is a microcosm of nearly everything that vexes people about the second Trump term.” (06/23/26)
- The Iran War won’t kill dollar dominance. But Washington might.
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Sam Fraser“Even if the framework agreement to end the U.S.-Israel-Iran War is successful, economic fallout from the conflict will persist at least through the end of the year. And the consequences for the global economic system — particularly the centrality of the U.S. dollar and its dominance of the oil trade — may be more far reaching. Analysts have suggested that the war may spell the end of the so-called petrodollar, or alternatively that it could bring about an era of renewed dollar dominance, or that really, the petrodollar ceased to be a meaningful driver of U.S. monetary hegemony decades ago. The latter vein of analysis is largely correct.” (06/23/26)
- When Congress Waged War on Cheap Groceries
Source: The Daily Economy
by Jeffrey L Degner“One of my earliest memories growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was a visit to the bakery at the A&P grocery store at 5800 Gull Road. It was one of a handful of places my parents could afford to shop at in the midst of the great stagflation of the 1970s. My mother made amazing birthday cakes for us as kids, and I presume she was there for some ideas. I had other things in mind. They gave away free ‘donut holes’ to kids who were presumably well-behaved, leading to my temporarily angelic behavior whenever we went there. Little did I know then, A&P was once regarded as a retail behemoth. A monopoly needing to be cut down to size. Their crime? Volume discounts. This allegedly nefarious practice was at the center of anti-chain-store sentiment that reached a fever pitch with the passage of the Robinson-Patman Act in 1936.” (06/23/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/when-congress-waged-war-on-cheap-groceries/
- Don’t Forget the Broader Context of the Iranian Memorandum
Source: American Greatness
by Victor Davis Hanson“The tentative ‘memorandum of understanding’ with Iran has caused glee on the Left and furor among many on the Right. The Left might welcome ‘peace,’ but surely not as much as it enjoys infighting on the Right over the details. If last week Democrats were calling Trump a fascist warmonger, now they deride his peace efforts as those of a Neville Chamberlain patsy. Within 24 hours, the Left’s talking points shifted from a mad bomber-style Curtis LeMay in the White House to an impotent appeaser. A week ago, some Republicans were arguing that not one of the prior seven presidents had dared to use force to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Now some of them are deriding him as an Iranian enabler.” [editor’s note: Poor Vic never seems to handle the failures of his approved schemes very well – TLK] (06/23/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/23/dont-forget-the-broader-context-of-the-iranian-memorandum/
- Interpreting Epidemic Curves: The Big Picture
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Michael Tomlinson“If there is one thing we have learned since 2020 it is the power of confirmation bias. The public health establishment has presented a mass of data and analysis to show that it was right all along about the Covid-19 pandemic and saved millions of lives. This finding has been accepted at face value and incorporated into policy, but rests on shaky foundations. We need to look at the big picture. Apologists for vaccination generally use point-to-point comparisons – they pick an arbitrary date near the peak of the epidemic curve and compare it to a later date to show that an intervention is correlated with a reduction in infections or mortality. This is open to case-counting window bias and immortal time bias – another selection of dates could yield an entirely different result.” (06/23/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/interpreting-epidemic-curves-the-big-picture/
- Thomas Massie Leads the Republican Revolt Against Trump’s Iran War
Source: Libertarian Institute
by José Niño“No War Powers Resolution has ever successfully survived a presidential veto in U.S. history. The vote is therefore largely symbolic but politically potent as a sign of fracturing GOP unity. And for Massie, an outgoing congressman with nothing left to lose, it represents a final stand for the constitutional principle he spent his career defending. Massie’s resolution will almost certainly die in the Senate or fall to a presidential veto, not because the constitutional argument is weak but because the bipartisan addiction to executive war-making is stronger than any single congressman’s principles.” (06/23/26)
- Colombians want security, with rule of law
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff“This month has seen two tightly contested runoff elections in South America. The results from Peru’s poll, held more than two weeks ago, are still not official – but indicate a razor-thin margin of 35,000 to 40,000 votes for the conservative candidate. The count of Sunday’s vote in Colombia has been much quicker, showing a win for right-wing political outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, by a 1% margin over his rival. In the wake of highly polarizing campaign rhetoric, some observers might see the results as confirmation of a deep, irreconcilable divide within the electorate. But, viewed through a different lens, the results point to the virtually equal desire among citizens for safety and rule of law – as well as policies that offer pathways out of poverty and high economic inequality.” (06/22/26)
- The Secret Origins of “Conspiracy Theory”
Source: Reason
by Jesse Walker“A new book shows how a phrase made its way from the crime pages to our political arguments—and picked up a passel of meanings along the way.” (06/23/26)
https://reason.com/2026/06/23/the-secret-origins-of-conspiracy-theory/
- Democrats Declare War on School Choice
Source: Town Hall
by Stephen Moore“Why are Democrats and their teachers’ union masters trying to shoot down parental choice in education even when we now have so many examples of these programs working? Choice and competition are two of the hallmarks of the American economy. When stores compete, customers win. Turns out this is also true for schools. That’s an inviolable law of economics. A corollary is that monopolies tend to put customers last. This is all happening at a time when public monopoly schools are showing flat or negative performance despite more funding than ever before. This is one reason why so many states are turning to the new model of school choice, with public funds going to scholarships and charter schools, and tax incentives for charitable donations to private and Catholic schools.” (06/23/26)
- Ron Paul Liberty Report, 06/23/26
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“Tucker To GOP: ‘I’m Outta Here!'” (06/23/26)
- Rising, 06/23/26
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave delivers his radar on Elon Musk’s new trillions, and Democrats’ promises to both rein in his wealth and prosecute him once they return to power.” (06/23/26)
- Cato Podcast, 06/23/26
Source: Cato Institute
“What the Declaration Still Has to Say in 2026.” (06/23/26)
https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-podcast/what-declaration-still-has-say-2026